OAKLAND, Calif. — A man was shot and killed in downtown Oakland near the Occupy encampment in front of City Hall Thursday afternoon.

A KTVU cameraman witnessed the man collapse in front of the Tully’s Coffee Shop at 14th Street and Broadway shortly before 5 p.m. KTVU reporter Janine de La Vega was in the area preparing to go live on the air when she said she heard several shots.

Emergency responders tried to resucitate [sic] the victim, who was described as a black male, as he was being lifted into an ambulance.

The victim died shortly after, authorities said.

Police cordoned off a large area where the shooting took place and were pouring over the area with flashlights searching for evidence.

There was also word of possible injuries to members of the media at the scene unrelated to the shooting.

Video from NewsChopper2 showed a person being wheeled into the back of an ambulance and driven away at about 5:15 p.m. BART held a train at the 12th Street/City Center Station to search for a suspect in the incident.

Occupy Oakland protesters told the media that the shooting had nothing to do with the encampment and didn’t involve any activists. Proteers [sic] surrounded the scene of the shooting and made a human chain to keep photographers from filming the victim.

Barucha Peller, who is part of the Occupy Oakland encampment, said some of the first people to help the victim were medics from the camp.

She said the shooting happened next to the camp, not in it. “The only direct Occupy Oakland involvement was in order to provide emergency first-aid services,” she said.

Let me highlight that last bit, in case you missed it:

Protesters surrounded the scene of the shooting and made a human chain to keep photographers from filming the victim.

From what I could see in the raw video, the Occupy protesters also seemed to be interfering with and/or not cooperating with the police.

The murder happened around 5pm; perhaps not so coincidentally Occupy Oakland had heavily advertised their one-month birthday party starting today — at 5pm:

You are cordially invited to Occupy Oakland’s one month birthday celebration!
Thursday November 10, 2011
5-10pm in the Amphitheater of Oscar Grant Plaza
Music, Dancing, Retrospective Slide Show & much more!
please bring donations of cakes, sweets & party favors!
SHOW HELLA LOVE FOR OCCUPY OAKLAND!!!!!

Could there be a connection? Had revelers shown up for the party, and then gotten into a fight?

Chaotic scene followed deadly shooting. Two news photographers were hurt by occupiers who attacked them as they tried to video tape the man who was shot.

Just moments before NBC Bay Area’s Jodi Hernandez was to go on the air with a live report, she reported hearing shots fired near Occupy Oakland.

Hernandez said she heard 6 to 8 gunshots on the south side of Frank Ogawa Plaza followed by screaming from people in the area at 4:59 p.m.

Police were not in the area at the time.

An ambulance arrived at the scene within a few minutes to treat the victim of the shooting. The injury appeared to be serious with emergency workers performing CPR on the man before he was taken away to the hospital. That man did not survive. He was declared dead after arriving at the hospital.

Hernandez said the mood prior to the gunshots was festive, adding people at the campground were getting ready to have a birthday cake to mark the one month anniversary of the encampment.

That changed dramatically after the shooting as it turned from calm to chaos. Police swarmed Frank Ogawa Plaza and closed off some streets in the area.

Hernandez reported that two Bay Area photographers covering the story were injured in the melee that followed the shooting. One of the photographers worked at KGO and suffered a cut to his head. He was apparently attacked by members of the occupy movement who did not want him to videotape the victim. The second photographer who was hurt was from KTVU. He said Occupiers wrestled him to the ground.

Occupy Oakland protesters told reporters the man who was shot was not part of their camp. They said they didn’t recognize him and said the shooting was not occupy related. In fact, some people on the scene said the man was coming to the area for help and/or protection.

“The person on the ground was not part of the occupation. I canverify that,” Shake Anderson, an Occupy Oakland organizer said. “This is a street incident. It happens all the time.”

The tent village is quiet as police and evidence technicians walk around with flashlights, searching for evidence, and 14th Street is closed while officers investigate. The occupiers were having a celebration to commemorate one month of their camp when the shooting occurred, and now many of them are relighting candles at a memorial set up for Scott Olsen, a former Marine and Iraq War veteran injured in an earlier rally.

Reporter Aimee Allison of the Chronicle says she was attacked when she tried to take a cell phone photo. And she wasn’t the only one: “A few feet away a TV cameraman was shooting footage and a crowd of twenty or so men attacked and punched him, forcing him over the railing of the 14th Street BART Station.” Which means, even in the best-case scenario, there was an unconnected murder right next to the camp and a mob of protesters decided to do “damage control” by beating the hell out of journalists who were trying to report on it. That’s where we’re at here. And do note: This wasn’t the only fatal shooting at an Occupy camp today.

The campsite in Oakland has become menacing enough that city council members were already calling yesterday for it to be dismantled and may force a vote of no confidence in terrible, terrible, terrible Mayor Jean Quan. Given how nasty things have gotten in Oakland over the past few weeks, I wonder if Oakland P.D. is up to the task; soon we may be hearing rumblings about Jerry Brown having to send in the national guard. Three clips for you here: The first two purport to be cell-phone video taken after the shooting in Oakland today. The cameraman says the dispute was over marijuana. The third, via Breitbart TV, comes from San Diego, not Oakland, but it’s a nice, short encapsulation of what seems to be the basic attitude at these things. Content warning.

49 Comments, 33 Threads

Here in Vancouver, #Occupy Vancouver has risen from puerile to pathetic. After one recovery from a near-fatal drug overdose (ho-hum), we had an actual death.
The Police Chief and Mayor (who is interested in people growing wheat in their front yards and keeping chickens in their back yards — I kid you not!) DO NOTHING!
I don’t know how many laws have been broken, but these good-for-nothing ‘leaders’ and ‘authorities’ don’t get it. I know, they’re scared of adverse publicity, if the scum riot, as they probably will. So why not have that ‘dust-up’ at the beginning, not after weeks of squalor and degrading the heart of Vancouver?

I was THIS CLOSE to going down there to cover the birthday party this evening — changed my mind at the last moment. Creepy! A “bad vibe” psychic feeling came over me. I got to pay attention to those more often!

the police chief tried giving a press conference at the site but was drowned out by chanting until he gave up. chances are good that this shooting was more of a drug deal gone bad or the result of an argument between the young, black thugs who make up most of the crowd down there lately (the college crowd has moved to the protest on campus in berkeley) but i don’t know how they can claim that this has nothing to do with the encampment when it took place no more than five steps away from the nearest tent.

Zombie, glad to read you didn’t attend this shindig. Oakland has been a mess far too long. Gangs, thieves, drugs, recently an elementary school teacher allowing children to expose themselves and engage in sexual behavior while in class, racial tensions abound etc.,

Sad, really. The mosaics, churches, religious and artistic frescoes throughout the city are quite beautiful.

I feel fortunate to have been an 80′s East Bay kid and see these wonderful pieces, places before the present time.

Occupy a morgue slab – it’s freaking Oakland, don’t these out-of-town nimrods know anything about OAKLAND?? Home of the Hells Angels, anyone? If you want peace and love you go Up To The Country (as the song goes), not to Oakland. Home of gangster rap, home of getting shot, home of murder, robbery, aggravated assault and more, an entrenched Socialist Government.
They thought they could get away with all the civil disobedience and unrest they could generate – only in Oakland the violence generates back on the occupier, or more often, the actual resident.

— “The tent village is quiet as police and evidence technicians walk around with flashlights, searching for evidence, and 14th Street is closed while officers investigate.”

Yeah, dat’s rights, it uh, you know, a *village* — with, uh, a fire brigade, a town crier, a constabulary, a coffin-maker, a butcher, a barber, an apothecary, and a candlemaker. It’s great. All we’re missing is the toilets.

Those of us not on the left saw this violence coming a million miles away. Unfortunately violence is what is going to bring OWS to an end in many cities. Hopefully the cold weather will chase away the majority leaving only the die hards.

It will mirror (and has already started to play out with this incident) the concerts that were marred with violence (including a murder) after Woodstock (they were hoping Woodstock was the first of many similar peaceful concerts). However that wasn’t the case. A concert at Altamont Speedway, billed as “Woodstock West” turned into a huge disaster after the,,,,Hells Angels,,, were hired as security (what could go wrong???).

I hate to say it, but this isn’t going to end well. Not just in Oakland too.

I’m here in the Bay Area. I’m at work all afternoon with a vacuum cleaner on my back, wearing a hearing protector with a built in radio.
KQED is the big NPR station. They announce “gunshots heard near Frank Ogawa Plaza”. I’m thinking “That’s the ‘Occupy Oakland encampment, isn’t it?” Am I mistaken? Why don’t they identify it as such?
Two hours of twice an hour, single sentence announcement, “gunshots fired at…”. Then they leave local news and reconnect to the National feed. National news tells us it’s the “Occupy…” encampment. Suddenly, the local station has to explain what they’d sat on, what they’d NOT told us.
Absolutely typical.

Imagine, your eight, nine, ten, eleven years of age. Great possibility your in grade school and in this fall season maybe possibly your attempting to put your mind into the school work and cling to enough of the imparted knowledge that comes your way. But alas, sirens wail and the pissin and moaning and groaning of this great mass of unwashed adults washes over the students ears morning noon and night, distracting the beejezzus out of them, both at home and school. And quite naturally despoils the little bit of intellectual mass that might have taken root in little Johnny and Joanies life this fall season of 2011. This has got to be like crack cocaine to all the ADD types or even the mildly distracted. Of course no one will contemplate the high school drop out rate spike six or seven years hence, OWS.

The request to bring cake is a reference to the beginnings of the French Revolution where when told that the protesting, unruly crowds marching on the Versailles Palace were poor, hungry citizens (the 1% of their day) yearning for some daily bread, Marie Antoinette, allegedly, disdainfully remarked,”Let them eat cake.”

Make no mistake about it….the evolution of OWS (Obama’s Wayward Soldiers) is already underway…Their real mission is to attack and disrupt Tea Party events and Republican campaign events from now until election day. If you doubt that…just go to a Republican event…anywhere…they are there…chanting, shouting, obstructing…exactly as Dear Leader would have them do….Chicago-style.

The U.S. now has so many itinerant village idiots, we’re running out of villages to accommodate them all.
Maybe if we put ATM’s and a Wall Street ticker tape in every state and national park, they’ll set up protest camps there.

Zombie: Thanks for the photowork. It is a rare view to see post cards from the culture of unreal.
Anarchy= away from structure. Which part of the oxymoron of the organization of anarchist is hardest to understand? The not-all-of-the-above answer is ‘when something goes dreadfully wrong.’

A lot of us older folks remember all this blast from the past. Everyone knows about Woodstock. RichB has reminded us of Altamont. That happened right in front of the stage, with the cameras rolling. Sawed-off poolo-sticks were the weapons of choice. Now, Chicago has come. A blast from the past, eh?

this has got to stop. if the police and govt will not stop it (and even encourage it) then ordinary citizens need to go down and put an end to it by any means neccesary. for thoes who want to critisize me and say im being mean. look im for the right to protest. but this has been over a month..thousands and thousands of dollars have been caused in damamge not to mention the loss of business earning. people are getting killed, raped, robbed and beaten by a group whos ultimate goal is unknown and more advertized is a highly marxist/anarchist agenda. who do you think is going to pay for the damages? CPUSA? SEIU? SDS? NPUSA? HELL NO!!! it will be up to US the taxpayer to pay for this nonsense. so in otherwords we are paying for the ‘privlidge’ of being beaten, raped robbed and despised. Oakland has a imbicile who encourages and defends this. so do expect any sympathy or help from cops, or the govt. in fact look for more venom comming from them including a tax increase someplace. Sorry i see NO reason at this point we should play nice and pay for this? anyone want to challenge me on this then fine im willing to listen. but its clear that pacifists are sheep waiting to be slaughtered. you will pay for your own destruction and claim that you are noble for it.

I have wondered if the way to break it up is for about 1000 tea party folks to show up, and one or two at time gravitate to the middle of the camps forming a blob. As the blob grew outward, it just kinda inched everything in its way outward. No yelling,screaming, or shoving, just by mass, reclaim the parks.

The problem now is that they would have to be wearing bio suits, which would give them away.

I read tonight that Oakland Police are being directed to evict the campers at Frank Ogawa park. Earlier today, notices to vacate were passed out through the camp. However, because Mayor Quan allowed the protestors right back into the park after the night of violence (Oct. 25, I think?), outside police departments have informed city officials that they will charge the city of Oakland something like $1000 per officer! So once again, due to this inept mayor and city council, the citizens of Oakland are going to be stuck with the bill. I also read that Oakland is the 5th worst violent city in the U.S. and the first west of the Mississippi. The cops posted an open letter to the protestors begging them to leave. How pathetic! The interim police chief can’t win. The previous police chief left because of Mayor Quan’s micro-managing the department. This is not going to end well, folks.